1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computer-assisted processing of electronic communications and, more particularly, to a method for categorization of electronic mail or other electronic communications based on the defined business processes, personnel skills and workflows of an organization receiving the communications.
2. Background Description
Much of today's business is transacted by reading electronic mail (e-mail), reports and other documents to gather the pertinent information to make informed business decisions. Customers require information on products and services. Many people are employed solely to read and respond to these customer requests and the money required to pay for this headcount is a large part of departmental budgets.
As customer expectations are set to receive information ever more quickly as a result of the ability to help oneself on the Internet, additional strain is placed on resource-limited companies. Often, the same information is requested repeatedly.
Many companies would like to find a way to address their customers' requests but at the same time they would like to reduce the time it takes to respond, to reduce headcount associated with answering these questions and to provide a consistent set of responses no matter the skill level of the people answering the requests for information. It is also important to transfer the knowledge and decision points from the experienced resources to new hires and less experienced personnel. Often, the method presently used to categorize and respond to the incoming electronic communications is incompletely defined, and the results of its use cannot be reliably repeated.
The current business practice for handling electronic communications is often to leave processing decisions to the discretion of the individual answering the communication. In general, the electronic communication enters a computer system run by the organization, it is reviewed by a human, possibly the communication is routed to other individuals, and when the proper respondent is reached, that person sends a response. Thus, electronic communications are not necessarily simply answered by the first person who sees them, although they might be, but they may be routed to a more appropriate respondent. At some point in the process, the electronic communication has a category attached to it to facilitate routing and response. Whatever action is taken is largely determined by how an electronic communication is categorized. The action taken is not entirely dependent on the assigned category only because of the reliance of human oversight.
Additionally, the attached category can be useful when and if an analysis of the workflow is undertaken. The categorization process is normally somewhat unstructured, although there may be informal written guidelines as well as a collection of response templates residing in a computer system that a person may use in handcrafting a computer-assisted response. The categories used may be imprecise and ambiguous, with the proper performance of the system depending on human intervention to resolve any problems that arise.
Referring now to the drawings, and in particular to FIG. 1, there is shown a high-level analysis of factors entering into current business practices for determining how to categorize electronic communications. Current business practice in this area has previously not been the subject of formal analysis. However, it is observed by the inventors that the development of the manual categorization scheme 100 is governed by two main elements:                1. the anticipated content 102 of the incoming electronic communication; and        2. a workflow analysis 104 of how the business should deal with various kinds of electronic communications. (Note: a workflow analysis determines where and how a particular electronic communication will be handled. It is based on the business mission 105, the skills of the people responding manually to the electronic communication 107, as well as any previously developed and stored responses 109.)An ad hoc approach is currently used to develop the categorization scheme from these two elements.        
One way to automate the routing and/or response to e-mail is, broadly speaking, to let a computer learn how to do the job of categorization. A specific means of letting the computer learn to do this job is to employ techniques in the area of machine learning called supervised learning. However, even with promising technology, in the absence of the right categorization scheme, “let a computer learn how to do the job” is only a slogan and not a solution. The best machine learning methods in the world cannot work if the categorization scheme does not match both the technology and the business needs simultaneously.